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Can New Metal-Air Transistors Replace Semiconductors and Continue Moore's Law? (ieee.org)
Will Moore's law really come to an end by 2025? Maybe not...
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades. The ACT device eliminates the need for semiconductors. Instead, it uses two in-plane symmetric metal electrodes (source and drain) separated by an air gap of less than 35 nanometers, and a bottom metal gate to tune the field emission. The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering...
Using metal and air in place of semiconductors for the main components of the transistor has a number of other advantages, says Shruti Nirantar, a Ph.D. candidate in RMIT's Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group. Fabrication becomes essentially a single-step process of laying down the emitter and collector and defining the air gap. And though standard silicon fabrication processes are employed in producing ACTs, the number of processing steps are far fewer, given that doping, thermal processing, oxidation, and silicide formation are unnecessary. Consequently, production costs should be cut significantly. In addition, replacing silicon with metal means these ACT devices can be fabricated on any dielectric surface, provided the underlying substrate allows effective modulation of emission current from source to drain with a bottom-gate field. "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers," says Nirantar. "So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies."
The article also suggests ACT devices could become important in space exploration, since electrons would be unaffected by extraterrestrial vacuums and radiation.
Nirantar was lead author on a new paper published in Nano Letters, and believes that their new approach "means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades. The ACT device eliminates the need for semiconductors. Instead, it uses two in-plane symmetric metal electrodes (source and drain) separated by an air gap of less than 35 nanometers, and a bottom metal gate to tune the field emission. The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering...
Using metal and air in place of semiconductors for the main components of the transistor has a number of other advantages, says Shruti Nirantar, a Ph.D. candidate in RMIT's Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group. Fabrication becomes essentially a single-step process of laying down the emitter and collector and defining the air gap. And though standard silicon fabrication processes are employed in producing ACTs, the number of processing steps are far fewer, given that doping, thermal processing, oxidation, and silicide formation are unnecessary. Consequently, production costs should be cut significantly. In addition, replacing silicon with metal means these ACT devices can be fabricated on any dielectric surface, provided the underlying substrate allows effective modulation of emission current from source to drain with a bottom-gate field. "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers," says Nirantar. "So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies."
The article also suggests ACT devices could become important in space exploration, since electrons would be unaffected by extraterrestrial vacuums and radiation.
Nirantar was lead author on a new paper published in Nano Letters, and believes that their new approach "means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."
Air gap as a channel material is interesting and may succeed. But it won't revive Moore's law because it doesn't address the reasons why Moore's law died in the first place.
"means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."
Isn't miniaturization a requirement for putting more transistors in a specified volume? Or did the laws of physics change while I was asleep?
Does it need to be continued? The summary reads like it does.
So we're back to vacuum tubes ?
For space exploration, maybe it could work in extreme temperature, for a Venus mission.
There is air and electrons in the gap so there must be quite a climate there, changing extremely rapidly.
Do you think climate change scientists care about brand stamps?
Pardon the non-English speaker, but what's a brand stamp?
Intel stamps its brand on everything it produces, theoretically making it more difficult to sell into certain markets. I'm stupid too. I need big brains to explain these things to me like I'm a toddler :)
Besides home and professional appliances are fast and small enough today, even scientific appliances are "good enough" today...
I'm not an expert on tubes. But what I read sounded very much like this.
I wonder though ... Wasn't the biggest problem with miniaturization, that the leads and gaps become so small, that the rules of where electricity flows and what isolates basically reverse? So even with such transistors, the lines connecting them would still have to be big. And if chips are anything like circuit boards, by far the most of it will be mere connections.
This reminds me of what happened with NAND (i.e. flash memory) a few years ago. Ever-smaller transistors hit a wall due to endurance problems (each one could only be reprogrammed a few hundred/thousand times), so they went back to larger transistors but started stacking them into layers. Now we're at ~96 layers, and it's expected that a few thousand layers is feasible.
The problem with layering in CPUs is how hot each layer gets, and adding new layers is unlikely to help single-core performance beyond what cache can do. So, we're going to end up with low-clockspeed (to minimize heat) thousand-core CPUs... which will actually be perfect for GPUs, not so much for that single-threaded productivity task. I could also see this being used for HBM, which is already stacked.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
>"The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering... "
And what about when not at room temperature? Seems like that little disclaimer could be what makes the whole thing impractical. A chip/board isn't going to be made up of ONLY these "metal-air" transistors, so it is going to generate a significant amount of heat or be near something that does. Plus, there is the overall environment in which the device will be used that needs to be considered. The article doesn't elaborate on this at all.
just because names used in trade are trade names doesn't mean stamps that are brands are brand stamps.
no need to be so wordy, you had me at "you're stupid"
The air will behave differently at different temperatures and pressures and also at different humidities.
Also if there is a Helium gas leak, your phone might stop working for another reason.
Pardon the non-English speaker, but what's a brand stamp?
As a native English speaker, let me assure you that nobody ever says "brand stamp".
Why do Slashdot editors insist on making headlines into questions that aren't answered in the article? A headline is a super-short summary the story. The story isn't a question, so the headline shouldn't be, either.
The story is, "Researchers believe new metal-air transistors could continue Moore's Law". It isn't a debate on this belief of those researchers.
Oh, wait - this is a click bait tactic used to make something seem more interesting than it really is...
Someday they'll never produce anything using this technology, and I'll never hear about it again.
Exciting.
1) Moore's Law is already dead
2) Air-gap transistors have been around since mid 1990s.
3) No offense, but it is doubtful such a breakthrough would come from some university I have never heard of in Australia. Based on their Wikipedia page they are known for art and design.
In theory there's all kinds of 'smaller' tech that allow shrinks for a few more generations. Each has only ONE property = smaller. Speed, power, robustness, reliability- they have none of these.
When the finFET era ends (in a few shrinks time) shrinking further with new appraoches will be so insanely expensive as trial-and-error R+D it just won't happen. Cos what could it give us if it did work. Another one or two shrinks? Before the atom limit hits again.
The REAL answer is CHIPLETS (lots of smaller chips connected with high speed interfaces) that companies like AMD are perfecting. Tech that was tried before but never really went anywhere cos, at the time, shrinking bigger more complex chips was far better.
Chiplets on small circuit boards which themselves can be 3D stacked with air-flow cooling solutions for never before seen densities. 3D chips are the WORST idea, as HBM memory has proven.
PS how soon before a mouth breather hits this thread and tells us that a single core running as fast as possible is where it's at, and quotes the laughable 'Amdahl's Law' to 'prove' this fact (pro-tip: this non-law came from a dribbler who was paid by the DoD to research auto-parallelisation methods for existing non-parallel programs- and 'proved' to no one's surprise that you cannot make a thing not designed for parallel processing faster by machine translating it onto multiple cores).
To the contrary, the next consoles from Sony and MS (with AMD tech) get more processor coress with more threads and will allow SINGLE applications (games) to run faster and better than ever before. So much for the dribble that is 'Amdahl's Law'.
Chiplets are the future when the shrinks end.
In scanning tunneling microscopy under vacuum, the metal tip usually had to be a few nanometers away to observe a decent tunneling current under normal bias. Tunneling 30-nm in air? I am not sure how that makes sense. Best read the paper when I get the opportunity.
what's a brand stamp?
It's like a tramp stamp, but made with fire.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are plenty of areas in personal tech that could certainly use a huge jump in speed and/or density.
Virtual reality, for example - a tenfold (or more) increase in graphics processing power would make personal VR amazing instead of just fun. Standalone setups like the Oculus Go could have 4k-per-eye graphics, with high frame rate and roomscale tracking.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes - which where exactly as described above: metal electrodes separated by a gap (vacuum not air) with a third electrode plate to control current
So now vacuum tubes replace transistors!
Wow!
It's the same reason YouTubers always insert the obligatory "What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below."
They mean for *you* to attempt answering it, and have somebody else disagree, and stir up "buzz", that gets people "involved" and hence presumably more "attachment" and hence clicks.
Nevemind that all it causes is an addiction, with all the negative aspects of an addiction, like constantly being in a bad mood, without any real benefits anymore. (But merely watching it to temporarily get back to normal.)
If I ever manage to make laws, and can't root out the core cancers behind it, I at least will make this a crime punished by getting cast out from human society.
That was my very first thought. Except it's not vaccuum. Of course neither were vaccum tubes. You had to lower the pressure to increase the mean free path. But if you could make this small enough then you could just do it right in the air. And by going to high fields you get to replace therm ionic emitters with field effect emitters. So less heat. And again to get high fields at low voltage you need to go small.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
... in air, I guess.
So in essence it's a vacuum tube? Just with room temp cathode and nano scale fabrication allows it to operate at normal pressures.
Are you a bot or just slightly insane?
In essence these seem to be very similar to vacuum tubes indeed. The question is, can you make digital circuits equivalent to CMOS with these? Because it's no effing good for digital circuits if you can't have zero static power consumption. I don't think you can do it with regular valves, because there is no such thing as complimentary valve, are these any different? You could certainly make TTL like circuits with these, but what good is that for CPU-s and such?
Whether it is overkill is irrelevant -- if that's the cheap standard, that's what you use, like terabyte thumb drives (if even us anymore) vs. 256 meg ones.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Just guessing but the mean free path is going to go down with temperature increasing. So cooling will be important or you need to make the devices smaller to get the temperature resistance you need.
Hmm, how do you make a CMOS pair out of that transistor?
I wonder what Microsoft will think up to waste all the additional compute power? Maybe preemptive aeroglass?
(I'd do it myself but I'm abandoning my mod points in this discussion in order to make a relevant posting.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Would be the problem. At cold temperatures air density would increase plus conductive resistance would decrease, leading to an increase in current flow and a higher possibility of unexpected side effects.
As temperatures increased resistance should increase which should limit the upper bounds of the circuit, since thermal runaway effects should not work as efficiently due to the air gap.
These circuits seem interesting, but I wonder what sort of effects they have on the longevity of the circuits compared to traditional silicon and previously germanium based transistor designs. Different corrosion traits may exist as a result of the air as well, since they didn't specify atmospheric concentrations for the cavities.
It seems rather silly. It’s not a statement of some absolute scientific truth - nothing really depends on it holding true or not. If Moore’s Law stops being true, it’s not as if Intel or TSMC or Samsung is going to be shuttering factories because their fabs won’t work anymore. Jony Ive won’t descend into madness because he can’t make things any thinner. Nothing practical will actually change, and technological development will continue to progress.
#DeleteChrome
Virtual reality is a real possibility, but they've got to resolve the vestibular canal disagreeing with the eyes about what's happening first, so people don't get nauseous. Some people can deal with it, but most can't without a lot of training, and some never can. And among those who can, a lot don't want to. Sea sickness isn't pleasant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Mine's electric
Burn coal, not trees
Why do Slashdot editors insist on making headlines into questions that aren't answered in the article?
Perhaps they were hoping to stimulate a discussion between knowledgeable posters, one which weighed the pros and cons of this new (take on) tech, and perhaps arrived at an answer to that question. They might also touch on other, unasked, questions such as whether such tech is desirable, and what we might use it for - something a couple of people have attempted.
The story is, "Researchers believe new metal-air transistors could continue Moore's Law". It isn't a debate on this belief of those researchers.
What? You mean we haven't killed them off last time?
And we have another data point verifying it.....
at the scales we are talking about, it is essentially a vacuum tube, air molecules are rare to be seen between electronics.
By a person that understands what Mooreâ(TM)s law really is.
Discourse on slashdot is very low SNR. Iâ(TM)d say what happened, but I donâ(TM)t have any business saying that because I know Iâ(TM)ll come back and wonder the same thing again tomorrow...
Alas, modern small high speed transistors are not zero static power consumption. It's a substantial problem that plays a part in the speed versus power tradeoffs.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Not so much similar as identical to vacuum tubes (or valves as we call them this side of the pond). It's just that the scale is so small you can let the air in without stopping the flow of electrons.
I guess computers will now be not only smaller, faster and sexier computers, but also sound warmer with more detail. All we need now is the miniature green felt tip pen :-)
How many AFRICAN researchers were involved in this brilliant new discovery?
Let me guess.
NONE.
It seems like thermal expansion would be an issue.